You're a Slave, Here's Proof

Readers' Poll

You feel enslaved

School

It all starts with school. You're coerced into attending school as a child, while your parents are coerced into paying for it. Both you and your parents had minimal say in terms of what goes on in school and what will be taught as part of the official curriculum. Most people just trust that the schools are doing what's best for the kids.

The truth about the schools is that children are going there to learn how to submit to authority. Children go to school to learn about the virtues of be unquestioning of established hierarchies. Whether or not that is the intended effect of government education, that's simply how it is. The strong willed are broken, and the unique and creative are standardized. Any nail protruding must be hammered into place, and that is the underlying principle of our schooling system.

When you come out of school you haven't been taught much of anything about reality and the competitive market you enter into. You realize that you've been cheated. You don't understand fiat currency, fractional reserve banking, or how to maintain a successful marriage or raise competent children. You come out having regurgitated the meaningless trivia you learned, and now you must face reality. Again, whether this is the intended effect of school or not, this is how it is. School teaches you to be passive and accepting of the current hierarchical establishments and leaves you with a feeling of impotence. Your role in society is to be a hardworking ant that ratifies the collective decisions of the colony by simply being present. You are told that you can leave the country if you think it would be better somewhere else, however, the rest of the world is under the domination of similar systems.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.

— John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing us Down

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.

— Chomsky

Tax

Taxes are your way of giving back to society and proving your dedication to your community. Taxes pay for your roads, healthcare, and emergency services, without taxes you'd be living life with a far lower standard of living. With taxes you can be sure that you will be protected in an invasion, and that justice will be brought to those who harm you. When you pay taxes you are doing it because you're free and you love your country.

That is what we are told.

The truth is much more embarrassing and uncomfortable. You are paying taxes so that the president's family can tour China on Airforce One. You're paying taxes in Canada so that the queen can have gold water facets and a fur coat. You're paying your taxes so that kids can go to school for 12 years and come out with a bag of wind, a memory of words. But it's actually worse than that, you're not paying for anything. You're being extorted and the idea that you're paying your taxes is simply a patriotic euphemism. You don't get to decide whether or not to pay taxes. You are forced to work a percentage of your work day for the government. The government can spend that money on tours, fur coats, gold water facets, illegal wars, or whatever they want. You can passively suggest that your opinion be represented a little better, and that's about it. You're a slave to your tax farmers and if you say this around the other slaves they will attack you. With such effective patriotic euphemisms as 'income tax', nobody feels enslaved and so they don't believe that they are.

Think of what the eagle really symbolized.

How

How can so many people live in this for their entire life and not seem to notice the immoral nature?

There are effective forms of propaganda implemented at an early age to spur feelings of gratitude, satisfaction, and other patriotic attitudes towards your oppressors. While growing up you likely saluted a flag, sang hymns to the state with your fellow slaves, and done other such rituals which gave you a rite of passage into your 'citizenship'. Statism functions in much the same manor as religion. People believe they are in a moral system because their parents, friends, extended family, neighbors, and probably everyone they ever spoke with believed that the system is moral. People maintain their passive, deluded sense of security in this established system of coercion because they dissociate from the reality of the situation. Dissociation is difficult alone and is more obviously a form of mental sickness in that circumstance. However, dissociation shared among large groups forms what psychologists sometimes refer to as the bystander effect, the bandwagon effect, or other similar phenomena.

How can sheep be herded to the slaughter without a sense of fear of discomfort? Sheep, like us, are highly social animals and can only survive with a large herd. Like us, they need their tribe to feel at ease. This works to their advantage in the wild, but among shepherds and sheep dogs, these animals become victim to their own trust. The naive gullibility of herds of sheep is very similar to human behavior. We will follow the leader with a simple base of the brain rationalization, along the lines of, "I'm just doing my job and so are they. We're all just trying to get ahead and pay the bills."

“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia;

they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.

In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.